Google’s unabashed clone of the Amazon Echo is interesting. They certainly have more cloud/back-end capability than Amazon when it comes to services and natural language parsing.
Amazon Echo is limited by only understanding US English and the although it has good speech recognition, I would call the interface a “voice command line” as it doesn’t have any real natural language understanding or context.
Google is really good, too good, on having context and being able to parse input based on current or prior contextual history. Unfortunately, that is often “too good”, I don’t like Google knowing so much about me and what I have done and Google is fast and loose when it comes to privacy – they only care about selling data to advertisers, not protecting user privacy.
Ideally, I would like to see Apple’s Siri 3rd party toolkit continue to evolve (what they just opened up at WWDC 2016 is very interesting).
It would be awesome if Apple, or maybe a smart 3rd party h/w guy, were to develop a far-field microphone array that perhaps used bluetooth to connect to Siri. One or more remote microphones plus Siri would be strong competition to Amazon Echo and the upcoming Google device.
Until Apple has some kind of microphone input that is not tied to pulling your phone out of your pocket (and limited to having to have an iOS phone/device), they are going to be left out of the “voice revolution” – at least for home control.